Perpetual Orbit

As I release the final marble from between my fingers, it glides down the stainless steel chute with the grace of a gold medalist flying down a luge. I hear it click into place, and the LED screen above the contraption lights up with a colorful burst. A victorious chime plays aloud.

“Bang!” I exclaim, channeling my inner basketball fan.

“Nice work, Pav.” Serenity emerges from behind me, giving me a gentle pat on the shoulder. “That brings you to the weekend, if my math is correct?”

I turn to look at her, and her eyes glimmer in the fluorescent overhead lights of the lab. She dons a soft smile that makes me blush. I think she’s proud of the work I’ve done this week.

“Weekend, indeed! I think I’ll grab myself a few beers and watch a miniseries.”

She chuckles. “I’ll have to join you one of these times. Enjoy, see you on reboot day.”

It took me a while to finally stop instinctively saying “see you on Monday” after a week of work. I still think it, though, whenever Serenity or one of my colleagues references reboot day. We don’t really have Mondays here, or Saturdays or Sundays. Our mission doesn’t follow the regular calendar. It’s an outcome-based schedule—more like the workend than the weekend. We’re given ten challenges to complete, and our weekends are earned once those challenges are finished. Some challenges are individual. My marble puzzle this afternoon took a few hours of iterative deciphering, not unlike an overly complex jigsaw puzzle might demand. Sometimes the challenges are collaborative, requiring us to work out disagreements and reach consensus. There are five other team members here, plus me. We all report to Serenity, who leads the mission.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Pavel Dorn, destroyer of challenges!”

It’s Maxwell, one of my five teammates. He plops down into an empty chair beside my workstation and clasps his hands behind his head.

“Another week in the books,” I say.

“Always so humble. You want to grab a burger later?”

I sigh, grabbing my bag and zipping it shut.

“I don’t think so, Max. Not tonight. I’m heading to the observation deck to take a look at the progress before turning in. I’ll catch you on reboot day.”

The rejection isn't personal. I like Maxwell. He's a tech nerd, I'm a science nerd. We complement each other.

Maxwell sighs and gets up from his chair. “You sure love that observation deck, Pav. Climate science nerd like you, I suppose it checks out. Have a good one, buddy. See you around.”

I sling my bag over my shoulder and start down the hallway of the ship. It’s about a two-minute journey up to the observation deck through several cold, mostly metal rooms and one staircase. At the deck’s entrance, I drop one of my observatory tokens into the slot beside the door. An indicator light turns green, and a pleasant chime welcomes me into the room.

Every time I walk into this room, I’m taken aback by its beauty. It’s wonderful. Like a miniature IMAX theater, I am completely immersed in the view from up here. We’re orbiting Earth, and this deck is the one spot on the ship from which I can see my home as we chip away at our critical mission. I walk over to the array of viewing controls, a vibrant arcade of buttons and dials. Pressing one particular green button, my view out the fortified glass becomes augmented with visual overlays showing how the operation is going.

It’s a highly classified mission. Operation Cloudviper. Serenity briefed us over the course of several days before the mission began. They’ve been modeling the earth’s climate for decades, and they finally identified a narrow window—the one we’re in right now—for corrective action. Operation Cloudviper utilizes ground-breaking technology to coordinate and sustain an injection of aerosol compounds into the upper stratosphere over this twenty-year window to reverse the compounding effects of climate change.

I guess that’s makes it sky-breaking technology, really.

“So, why do we need to be in space?” I remember asking her.

It was one of those questions the instructor hopes the student will ask, so they have the opportunity to further explain. She gave me a radiant smile.

The experts believed there was a risk, albeit a very small one, that the aerosol injection could backfire. I still remember the way Serenity tried to dance around this topic. I could see the unease in her eyes. We all could. Maxwell was the one blunt enough to chime in and concisely finish her explanation for her.

“We’re up here in case everyone down there gets completely obliterated by Operation Cloudviper.”

The silence in the room was the only confirmation needed. And for the last five months—at least I think it’s been that long—we’ve been doing our part.

I look out the massive, exquisitely clear window adorned with digital overlays augmenting the view of Earth. Our progress has been good. Albedo readings over the poles have improved, and upper stratospheric wind shears have reduced. The increments are minuscule, as is expected. But over our twenty-year tenure, they’ll add up.

We’ll save the world.

Before I head back to my quarters for the weekend, I carry out the same routine I do every time I’m up in this magnificent room. I sketch what I see before me, in excruciating detail. Art has always been a gift of mine, and the exercise is therapeutic. Each time, christening a new page in my pad, I sketch the earth’s position, its cloud formations, its coastlines. I find it helps me internalize everything. To internalize the meaning behind the most important work I’ll ever do.

The weekend comes and goes, and it’s back to the grind. This week, we’ve got seven individual challenges and three group ones. I was utterly fascinated when Serenity explained the challenge system during our first week.

“This ship,” she said, “is powered by the greenest energy in human history. It features state-of-the-art bioelectric and cognitive energy harvesting. Your brain activity generates measurable bioelectric output. It always has. Now, at last, we are able to capture and amplify that.”

I looked at her with a mixture of awe, disbelief, and unbridled excitement.

“Of course, the ship is also equipped with traditional fuel, in case it’s needed. But if this experiment goes as we hope, we’ll come out of Operation Cloudviper with a restored climate and a brand new, tested means of producing energy that will keep it that way. And it all runs on the cognition of this brilliant group of six.”

I’ve admired Serenity ever since that speech. So, this week, I decided I want to spend more time with her.

“Serenity!” I exclaim as she struts in to check on my progress. “Let’s do something fun.”

“Fun?” She guffaws. “It’s only reboot day, Pav. You’re already thinking ahead to the weekend?”

“Well, yeah. Look, remember how I was all into broadcasting in a past life? I want to make a video. Like a 60 Minutes kind of thing. It can give this mission some posterity, you know? Future generations can watch it and get a feel for what it was like. I’ll ask you all about our mission and how important it is, and talk about life on the ship and whatnot.”

Her coy smirk says that she’s interested, even though she doesn’t offer an immediate acceptance. After a few moments, she shakes her head.

“You’re something else, Dorn. Sure, it’s a date. I’ll dress to impress.”

I get butterflies. Powering through my next nine challenges is pretty brutal, given how much I’m looking forward to filming the interview with Serenity this weekend. Eventually, we get there.

It’s a makeshift studio. I converted a large file room by hanging some moving blankets and setting up a few lights. By the time Serenity shows up, she’s beaming.

“Look at you! I didn’t know we had a young Spielberg on the roster here. Why’d you accept the duty of this mission again, when your calling was in Hollywood?”

“I’m glad you like it,” I say. “Shall we?”

Bringing her over to an upholstered armchair for the featured talent, I sit her down and get her microphone pack secured. We both have fun with it. It feels like five minutes to me, but in reality, it’s almost an hour later that I’m asking the final question of my interview plan.

“And lastly, Ms. Miller, what would you say to—“

Her pager beeps, interrupting the question. She glances down at its screen, a look of concern washing over her face.

“Pav, I’m so sorry, we need to wrap up here. I have a pressing matter to attend to. Thanks so much, this was a blast! Can’t wait to see the video.”

She rushes out of the room before I can say anything back. She left a half-empty cup of coffee in the corner, along with her laptop. I’ll bring it by her office later.

I exhale and lean back in my own chair, tossing my interview sheet to the side. It’s a weird feeling, the aftermath of something so fun and different. I hadn’t really noticed that this room was as quiet as it was when Serenity was in here. Now, sitting solitarily in the glorified file room, it feels like I’m in a void. I marinate in it for several minutes.

Then I realize there has been a soft disruption in the silence, and I can’t pinpoint when it started. A muffled and irregular buzz. It’s coming from the studio headphones. I slide them over my ears.

“Anyway, the group is doing great this time. I’m so impressed by them,” Serenity says. It sounds like she’s talking on the phone to someone.

Her microphone is still on.

“And remember how I was telling you about Pavel? Gosh, he’s so committed to it. He’s a whole-hearted believer in the cause. He flies through the challenges, and his compliance scores, they’re—“

She trails off, as if the person she’s talking to has chimed in from the other end of the line. Then she continues.

“Oh stop, you’re reading too much into it. Plus, he’s not my type. He’s adorable, babe, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about.” She giggles through the last few words.

It’s like a punch to my gut.

Who’s she talking to? I guess somewhere deep down, I knew we couldn’t be together. That part stings. But what the hell else is she talking about? My compliance scores?

“Alright, sounds good. I’ll see you when I get home. Love you!”

She hangs up. I stew in the information, trying to figure out why Serenity has compliance scores for me. Trying to accept the fact that she’s in love with someone. Trying to understand how and why she sounded like she was about to take the express train home in time for dinner with her partner when we’re three hundred miles from the surface of the earth.

Why is she talking to her partner about me? And why did she call me a believer in the cause? It’s the most important science experiment in history, not a magic show.

Despite my usual rule of only using one observatory token at the end of the work week, I storm up to the deck to decompress. I pop a token into the slot and I sit in the cushioned chair in the center of the room, staring into the darkness that is illuminated only by our miraculous spinning rock. I gaze at it, taking in the Saharan dust plume floating across the Atlantic and the tropical cyclone brewing over the Indian Ocean. I let hyper-focus become my coping mechanism.

And then my throat tightens.

I look more closely. I notice the leading edge of the dust plume. I observe the position and the spiral density of the cyclone. I see a band of clouds hugging the Ethiopian Highlands.

Grabbing my sketch pad, I start flipping through pages violently. I’ve been sketching what I see from this deck every week for the last five months. Eventually, I find a page from my first month on the mission. I hold it up at eye level, glancing back and forth between it and the vast expanse beyond the glass.

It’s exactly the same.

It can’t be the same. It’s impossible. But it’s exactly the same.

My pulse begins to quicken as I bolt out of the soft crater of the chair and back down to the file room. While I’m en route, I fire off an instant message to Maxwell on my pocket-sized messaging device.

SOS. Meet me at the file room I was filming in. Now.

The doorframe rattles as I blast through it and make a beeline for Serenity’s laptop. It’s locked. I knew it would be; that’s why I texted my teammate.

“What’s going on?” Maxwell says as he enters the room. I hurry over and lock the door behind him.

“Get me into Serenity’s computer. It’s urgent,” I say.

He looks at me, confused. “Pav, I—“

“Maxwell!” I say. “I think that computer might tell us things that change everything we understand to be true. I need you to get me into it.”

The frightened look in his eyes signals clear reception of my urgency. He sits down at the machine, brings up some kind of terminal, and a few minutes later, we’re into Serenity’s system.

“Here you go. Wanna tell me what the hell’s going on now?”

My brain won’t let me answer him yet. When I open a web browser on the machine, it yields the Google homepage. I’m on the internet.

The keystrokes would echo off these metal walls if not for the blankets hanging everywhere. That’s how hard I hammer the keys when I type Pavel Dorn into the search bar. By this point, Maxwell has decided to observe over my shoulder in lieu of a verbalized answer.

As search results populate onto the page, I glance at the date and time in the corner of the screen.

December 12, 2036.

Maxwell is staring at the same date, sharing my sense of bewilderment. I start scanning the article headlines. They’re scattered across different dates, but they tell a harrowing narrative.

Pavel Dorn Still Missing.

Family of Climate Scientist Finally Calls Off Search.

Remembering Pavel Dorn.

“What the…”

Maxwell can barely muster the words. I still have none. My mind is racing. Finally, only numbers come out.

“2036?”

My memory of boarding this ship is foggy—we all went voluntarily into medically induced comas at launch—but it was not 2036 when I boarded. My last memories on Earth were in late 2033.

What are those memories? I remember saying goodbye to my family; at least I think I do. But I can’t visualize the scene. I can’t remember what my parents said to me. I remember an immense feeling of purpose, of drive, of dedication to the cause. But I can’t see it in my mind’s eye.

The files on Serenity’s machine are plentiful. Maxwell takes the wheel as we scour it for evidence.

“Holy shit,” he says. I crane my neck to get a view of what he’s now reading aloud. “Subjects serve six-month tenures, reintegrating to the mission with medically induced comas and memory cleansing at the conclusion of each cycle.”

“Find our names,” I say. I don’t even know exactly what the request means. I’m in shock. Maxwell seems to understand, though. His expression darkens as he looks on.

“This is your fourth cycle. My second.”

Four six-month cycles. I only remember waking from one coma. I’ve been on this ship for two years.

Before I can rip myself from my horrified spiral, the jiggling of the door handle breaks my trance. “Pav? Pav, are you in there?”

It’s Serenity. The woman I was so admiringly serving. The woman who evidently kidnapped me and launched me into space.

I storm over to the door and rip it open, staring daggers into her eyes.

“Why the hell are we here, and who are you?”

Her features sour as she looks past me and sees Maxwell and the open computer. She sags and holds her hands out submissively.

“Pav, I can explain this. I—“

An unexpected impulse overtakes me, and I no longer care about her explanation. I grasp her by both shoulders and whip her around into the wheeled chair beside me. Towering over her, I see a keycard dangling from her retractable waist clip and tear it away from her.

“Tie her up,” I tell Maxwell.

“Pavel, please! You don’t understand, this is all part of the mission—“

“Screw your mission, Serenity!”

When Maxwell has finished securely wrapping the extension cords around her torso and the chair, I gesture with my head for him to follow me.

Weaving through hallways and following the exit signs, we finally arrive at the door to the airlock that I vaguely remember from boarding the ship. I scan Serenity’s badge, and the double doors open with a hiss.

It’s not what I expected an airlock to look like, on the other side. Instead, it’s a long set of stairs—at least quadruple the length of any staircase I’ve seen thus far on the ship—and it’s entirely dark, save for dim track lights along the risers and a sliver of light emanating from the edges of a door at the top.

“Pav…”

We climb the staircase and reach the door. I feel a warmth radiating from its metal surface. I look at Maxwell before pushing it open.

Beyond its threshold, a scorching mid-afternoon sun bakes the barren Arizona desert.